Lightborn. Part 18

she managed, though her heart promptly started to thump with fright. "Meri-Merivan," she tried, as her sister bolted past her into the bedroom of the suite. She started to go after her; the Lightborn's will collapsed her legs beneath her. she demanded, and pushed back hard. At least no one was near enough to be injured, should the fire erupt around her.

That thought stayed the Lightborn's a.s.sault. she said. And bringing to the forefront of her mind her mother's memory of the suffering archduke.

blurted out of her. She thought he had gone, with his final cruel sally, but he said, As if his mental voice wasn't like being rubbed with ground gla.s.s, she thought. She sensed him making an effort to contain himself. Pride was at stake, the pride of the trained Temple mage. Another thought jumped, flealike, between them, her opinion of their training, and their principles, that they had neither sensed the Shadowborn nor moved against them. She sensed his sudden, acute attention, a focus sharp as a meat knife. he said. she said, and did so, smothering the flames as readily as she had done those kindled in her folded papers.

he said, suddenly sounding desperately tired. Like Ishmael, at times, she thought, and fought a softening. She began again, from her meeting with Ishmael di Studier and their arrival on her husband's doorstep to find Balthasar battered and dying. . . . He asked no questions; perhaps he did not need to, understanding far more of magic than she. The truth, unadorned, did not take very long. At the end she said, Utter lack of compromise in his tone.

And after sunrise, she could not travel at all. Maybe there was a way through the tunnels that would bring them close to the archducal palace. Maybe since the archducal palace was well away from the prince's palace, maybe being a healer mage, she might last long enough outside . . . if she did not lose her reason first. Her courage shriveled at the memory of the sear of light on her skin.

he said, anguished again at some memory. She sensed him fighting for composure. I am not-a twitch of old reflex. he said, his tone a slap. she said, with all the outrage a woman could summon.

she demanded-thinking of Ishmael returning burned, shocked, and reeking from beneath the burning Rivermarch, thinking of her daughter screaming as the warehouse blazed around her, thinking of Vladimer, laid out unconscious on his bed. Of Sylvide's fading presence, and the wet warmth of her blood. And them, the Lightborn mages, aloof in their superiority.

he defended himself. A moment's wrestling with himself, quite palpable across the link between them. The overtones of his mental voice made her wary. He was remembering a much-beloved, dangerous man, and the measures that the mages had taken to restrain that man's powers. she said, in horror.

he said, and she sensed a surge of bitter grief-the man had died with the others in the tower. There was, she thought, something calculated about that disclosure, for all she felt it to be true. And his feelings around his own binding were almost-content. As though being bound had let him set aside his responsibility for his powers and be other than he was for a while. She could understand. His mental voice was slightly mocking, but she did not doubt, and let him know she did not doubt, a mage of his power and experience could hide any malign intent until it was too late. And she was again alone, in a small suite decorated with the fading grandeur of burlesque memories. Merely another of the extraordinary places she had pa.s.sed through since she had met Ishmael di Studier. She pushed herself out of her chair and went through to the bedroom. Merivan was lying limply on the bed, on her back, damp cloth on her forehead. By the fullness in her figure, she would have no choice but to retire from society very soon.

"Oh, Meri." She reached out a consoling hand, both for her sister's present misery and future unhappiness, remembering just in time that she wore no gloves. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to alarm you. I've just had a-conversation-with a Lightborn mage. I lit the fire to attract his attention. If it's any consolation to you, I have been most roundly scolded."

"It's no consolation," Merivan said, faintly. She lifted the cloth and sat up, mustering her authority. "I had entertained some foolish hope that this was-some fantasy, some exaggeration, something that-we could recover from. But that-demonstration of yours . . ." She paused to dab her face and throat with the cloth. "It is one thing, Telmaine, to trespa.s.s with touch. Another to . . ." Do that, her wordless gesture said.

Telmaine had also cherished hopes that Merivan might bring herself to accept Telmaine-the-mage, or at least forgive her, as their mother seemed ready to do. Vain hopes, it seemed. She said, quietly, bare hands clasped together, "You thought something like Ish-Baron Strumh.e.l.ler's. Truly, so did I. I had no idea myself what I was capable of; I still don't."

"Baron Strumh.e.l.ler," Merivan said, with a wraith of her old ire. "This is all his doing. And that husband of yours."

"And what does it matter whose doing it is, mine, theirs, or the G.o.ds? If the archduke dies-particularly now, with what Mycene and Kalamay have done-it will all be on my conscience." She paused. "The Lightborn mage said he could help me get back to the palace safely. In return he wants to bind my magic so I will no longer be a danger."

"Is that possible?" Merivan said.

"He seems to think so."

"It would be better," Merivan said slowly, "if he could take it away entirely." The stroke of sonn that followed was as deliberate as a gallant's glove slap.

She remembered the crumbled-charcoal sense of Ishmael's magic. She remembered the dread with which he had warned her against the Temple Vigilance, who would burn out the magic and perhaps the mind of a renegade mage.

"I don't know what the effect would be on me," Telmaine said.

"But if it could be done without ill effect, you would have it done."

How typical of Merivan, Telmaine thought, to deliver such a question in a manner that was no question, was a decree. And if it could be done, if she could surrender it in a way that did her no harm, if she could be what she had always-until this last week-taken care to seem to be . . . She realized she did not want to answer that question, here and now, much less give any kind of promise to Merivan, who would surely hold her to it.

"Telmaine? You surely cannot want to go through the rest of your life-and have your daughters go through theirs-known as a mage."

"I'll decide later," she said, bravely, knowing that quite insufficient even for a sickly Merivan. "Meri, I can-help your arm. And your indisposition."

Merivan had drawn breath to interrogate Telmaine's hesitation, but at the offer her expression suddenly rippled between nausea, uncertainty, and fascination. Suddenly, wincing, she thrust out her bandaged hand, fist clenched. "You know it all anyway."

Telmaine brought both hands around her sister's, warily, but could not repress a whimper as she received the full force of Merivan's thoughts, directed straight through their touch at Telmaine's heart: bitter accusation of the ruin Telmaine had made of her life and of her innocent daughters' lives, and the shame she had brought to her family. She whispered, "You don't understand," but gathered her magic. It flooded up Merivan's burned arm, closing raw and weeping skin. She heard Merivan gasp, felt her appalled wonderment for several heartbeats before she s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away.

"I feel quite restored," she allowed, with suffused civility. "Thank you."

Telmaine smiled sadly. Whether her healing had in any way mitigated Merivan's anger and estrangement, her relationship to her sister would never be the same. Merivan was the determined upholder of society's norms and prejudices, and Telmaine had just shattered those norms. She said, "I'm going to go to the archduke now. I don't know how long it will be before it will be safe for you to go home. But your children and husband should be safe."

"a.s.suming," Merivan said, "the Lightborn do not retaliate against us for the toppling of their tower. Sweet Imogene, what were Mycene and Kalamay thinking?"

Telmaine could have answered that, had she chosen. Merivan said, "Yes, it is imperative that Seja.n.u.s live. We cannot have a regency council ruled by the very same dukes who might already have had us at war with the Lightborn." At Telmaine's drawn breath, she tilted her head and cast a cool splash of sonn over her. "Little sister, your tender conscience is the least of this. Hasn't that husband of yours educated you at all? A twelve-year-old archduke and a nineteen-year-old prince cannot possibly manage this crisis."

And in that, Telmaine thought, was the reason for the mage's willingness to help her. He loved the prince, as a younger brother, a hope for the future, a son, even.

Merivan crossed to the little sink and hung the towel over the edge. Without turning, she said, "It is as well Mama encouraged a little independence in her daughters, or else I would be quite helpless without a maid. Do go, if you are going."

Mage sense led her up another flight of stairs, to Kip's room. The apothecary answered the door to her knock, his face relaxing as he sonned her. "Lady Telmaine."

"Do let me in," she said. Despite the gravity of her errand, she could not avoid sonning the room itself, curiously, since it had until recently been Ishmael's. She was disappointed: Ishmael did not acc.u.mulate possessions. He would be even more appalled than Balthasar, who at least had a weakness for books, at her acc.u.mulations of trinkets and jars and jewelry.

"Good t'have you up and about again," Kip said, his face wary.

"You know, don't you?" she said, simply.

A half shrug, spread hands. "Don't prevaricate," she said. "You know what I am."

"A mage," he said, cautiously. When she did not take prompt umbrage, he grinned cheekily. "So that was why Magister di Studier was so taken with you." His next voiced thought quenched the grin even more quickly than she would have quenched it with a cutting remark. "We've a cursed disaster on our hands, m'lady, if Kalamay and Mycene brought down the Mages' Tower, and the archduke's dying."

"I'm going back to the palace," she said.

"There's no way, from here," he said, flatly. "The underground streets near it were filled in during the Borders uprising."

"There's a Lightborn mage going to help me." She decided to omit the price of that help. "I need you to look after my sister. She knows-I've just told her-about me. I need you to help her get home. Then if you want to risk coming back to the palace . . ."

"They'll not let you at the archduke," he said. "Not to heal, not after-" He stopped suddenly.

She did not read magic to know his thoughts, the conclusion he had reached. She said in a low voice, "I never meant to hurt him, or anyone. The Lightborn mage thought I was a Shadowborn, or Shadowborn agent, because I had been experimenting with Shadowborn magic. He tried to disable me, and I lost control. We've reached a better understanding since."

"What a cursed mess," he said, with feeling. "No need to get further into it with me. I can guess some of th'rest, from what Magister di Studier said. A high-society lady, and a mage." His grin was wicked. "I do like it."

"I'd rather," she said stiffly, "you said nothing about this to anyone else."

A flicker of an ironic expression warned her that he appreciated how hollow the request was. "Lord V. know?"

"Yes."

"Th'Mother help you, Lady Telmaine. That's not a man you want for an enemy."

Her thought exactly. But she could not help asking, "Do you not mind magic?"

"Because society doesn't?" he returned. "What's society ever done for the likes of me but toss a few coin our way and deride us from its pulpits as drunks, wh.o.r.es, and b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? We've had far more good of magic than we have had of virtue." He paused, and then remarked, with breathtaking gentleness and impertinence, "You'll be welcome among us, if they turn you out."

Tammorn said the Darkborn lady. He had been aware of her, ready to restrain her magic, if need be, though he had hoped it would not be necessary. She had a natural gift for healing, he thought, and was displaying something of the profligate exuberance of a younger mage, newly come to her full strength. As well as a desperation to recoup as much virtue as she could from her fallen state.

Lightborn customs were cruel and self-serving, imposed by the Temple in their own self-interest; knowing that, living that, had turned him to rebellion. Yet Darkborn beliefs were as cruel, allowing the earthborn to condemn the mageborn merely for their very nature.

he said. He was aware of her ambivalent relief, though she tried to mask it from him, that she might be safer, but also that he might be sparing the greater part of her power. She had little sense of her own true potential. But were he to explain all that he was taking away from her, she might refuse to let him do it, and if she understood her own strength, she might resist his restraint-successfully, perhaps. Leaving him with the problems of her untrammeled power, and the dying archduke. This was for the best. It was only temporary.

she said, and while he was puzzling over the word, she explained, She did. A Lightborn, man or woman, would be asking questions, not waiting with this semblance of docility-a semblance, he knew, because he could sense the conflict in her between the wish to question him and the wish to know no more than she did.

He could not miss a sudden rill of fear and rejection from her at a memory of another mage's mental scream of agony. Piqued at the comparison between himself and a Darkborn first-ranker, he said, She was not rea.s.sured, but said nothing.

she said, but he could not help but feel her hope that once she healed the archduke, everything would start to come right. As gently as he could, he said, She didn't answer.

she said, flinching, and he felt her flex her magic and reach out. He took from her mind the sense of that vitality, agonized and failing as it was, and expanded his awareness around it. Two old men, one younger, the younger one with his own quota of physical and, especially, mental torment. He lingered over that vitality, realizing it must be the Lord Vladimer who had permitted the slaughter of the tower to proceed. It would be so simple to tear open the vessels in his wounded shoulder in such a way that no one could stanch the bleeding. Darien or Floria White Hand would. But he, he was no a.s.sa.s.sin. The man was who he was, had done what he had done for his own reasons. And, as such unprincipled men often did, he would likely find his own punishment.

Tam extinguished the three consciousnesses with the lightest of touches and the reverence the task required, like pinching off the wick of a ceremonial candle.

He slipped the sheath of his magic over her, just as he had watched be done with Lukfer and experienced himself, letting it shape itself around her form as around the form of a talisman. He left only her hands free. It was not a perfect binding, but he did not believe she had the conscious mastery to use that gap in the binding to free herself. Her understanding of her magic was still too much influenced by the first-rank mage who had made himself, inappropriately, her teacher.

He felt the binding quiver slightly; she must, he thought, have tried to speak to him. he said.

He centered himself, concentrating inwardly for a few heartbeats to ensure he had no physical weakness primed to bloom as the magic drained his vitality. The Temple trainers had a wide repertoire of cautionary tales, some grotesque. Then he coiled his magic around the woman and lifted.

Nine.

Telmaine Telmaine felt the Lightborn magic swirl and flex around her, and the sense of weightlessness that great magic evoked in her. She had a sudden, vagrant memory of herself as a small child delighting in jumping from chairs, from stairs, and even-when she could cozen a male relative into lifting her up-from high garden walls. Before jumping became yet another thing a duke's daughter did not do.

And she was simply elsewhere. She stifled a cry behind her hands. Yes, she had been witness and privy to the impossible since she and Ishmael had arrived on Balthasar's doorstep, but not direct witness to something as impossible as this.

Then she heard the rasping, rattling breathing from in front of her. Smelled mint and dried flower petals that could not mask the reek of disinfectant and medicinal alcohol, burned flesh, and dire illness. Her first fluttering sonn returned a vague outline of a raised, rectangular shape, not a man, but a coffin. She had no sense of his vitality. She all but fainted before reason overruled the horror with the certainty that if he were not still alive, she would not be hearing that breathing.

She cast again, more firmly. Tam had placed her at the foot of the bed. The form was a cage beneath the bedclothes, so that they not press against his burns. She could lift the bedclothes and reach beneath; that would be practical, but a trespa.s.s so indecent she could not consider it, absurd as that might seem.

Dukes Imbre and Rohan slumped in chairs on one side of the bed, Vladimer on the other. He had been leaning forward when Tam stripped awareness from him, and had slipped from the chair partially across the bed, and now lay awkwardly hunched with his wounded shoulder beneath him, his head turned away and resting on his brother's pillow. He wore a heavy dressing gown, and his feet were bare, exposing the deformity of the one leg. There was no cane within his reach.

Even so, she instinctively put s.p.a.ce between herself and him. Steadying herself briefly on Rohan's chair, she moved between them, her skirts brushing Duke Imbre's sprawled legs, wincing for the indignity at so n.o.ble and faithful an old man. He had slumped sideways in his chair, his outstretched hand lightly clasping the archduke's, as a man might a sick boy's. He had been a father himself when the archduke was born; his daughter had been the archduke's wife.

She knelt, crushing her mother's skirts, and crept her fingers forward, nudging aside the upper slopes of the tent, touching bandages. Even through the bandages, she could feel the heat of the archduke's fever. His skin, raw with burns and pain, scorched her fingers and burned through to her heart.

Now that she had touched him, she dared sonn his sunken face, thinking it must offer no new horrors. But it was an accusation in itself, the ruin of all that graciousness, strength, and abundant vitality. She made a sound half sob, half plea for forgiveness. The man under her hand groaned and twitched his head toward the sound. A breath shaped itself around a name, a woman's name. Briefly, amidst pain, came the memory of a woman's laughter, a silk-sheathed waist supple between his hands, a woman's fingers walking, teasingly, down the skin of his abdomen. Telmaine's face heated in a most incongruous embarra.s.sment. The name had sounded quite unlike the name of his wife, and no respectable woman wore clothes that left the body so revealing to touch. That the widowed archduke had a mistress was common knowledge, amongst men, at least.

She pushed her left hand forward, beside her right, as though he were a weight she expected to lift, spreading the load. She took a deep breath, and let her magic, her healing, surge into him. And instead of an immensely heavy load, suddenly she had a lofting spirit, light as air, beneath her hands.

said Tam.

But the archduke was smiling, dreaming of the lady with the supple waist and lewd manners. Telmaine was the one who was leaden-boned, scarcely able to brace her hands against the bed and Rohan's chair and get her feet under her without tearing out the hem of her mother's dress.

Tam said. The archduke sat up. He jarred and caught the protective cage and sheets in both hands with a startled, "What?" His forceful, resonant sonn impaled her like a b.u.t.terfly, and swept over the sleeping Imbre and Rohan. His hands explored the cage, the sheets, the bandages on chest and arms, the unmarked skin of his face-there they moved with a flinching uncertainty that told her just how much he remembered. In one motion, he threw the cage and sheets aside, tucked his feet beneath himself, and rolled to a crouch, confronting her, naked but for the bandages and quite oblivious to it. "Is this your doing?" he demanded of her, low, intense.

She recoiled, but the archduke lunged for her, seizing her wrist, sliding off the bed onto his feet. "You are not leaving," he said, "until I get answers." Tethered by his hand, she could not escape the force of his feeling, the memories of agony, of voices talking above him of death, of a man weeping.

Tam said, His sentence went unfinished, cut off as suddenly as it had been when the Mages' Tower came under attack. The archduke's head came up and around at sounds from outside; then the bedroom's heavy double door was flung open before a wave of men, the Duke of Mycene in the lead. She had the vagrant thought, He moves like Ishmael-and then he had his revolver against her head.

"Release them, sorceress."

Behind him, Phineas Broome cried out, "I sense Lightborn."

"Release them now." Mycene dug the muzzle of the revolver hard into the tender skin beneath her ear. As his very last act of will he would blow her brains out-as he had been prepared by his very last act of will to bring down the Mages' Tower. The archduke's grip shackled her to his memories of torment and fire.

"I can't," she appealed. "I can't release them. They'll wake up soon, I promise."

Phineas Broome, at Mycene's shoulder, said, "The ensorcellment on them is Lightborn. There's one on her, too."

"It's not an ensorcellment," Telmaine gasped. "They will wake up, if you would only wait a moment or two."

"Don't trust her," Kalamay said. "She's a sorceress."

Blessedly, Imbre's legs twitched. Rohan stirred in his chair and sat up, "What . . . Ja.n.u.s?" Through Seja.n.u.s's touch, she felt his sear of alarm as Vladimer groaned. The archduke said to Mycene, "Hold her," and rolled across the bed to land beside Vladimer. He slid an arm beneath Vladimer, eased him off his wounded shoulder, then shifted his stance and lifted him easily onto the bed.

"Sorcery," Kalamay breathed, in horrified awe.

Telmaine, released, swayed. Claudius Rohan, not Sachevar Mycene, caught her and helped her into the chair he had just vacated, and waved Mycene's revolver away to a modest distance. She could have wept at the kindness, knowing that in a moment, he might loathe her for what she was and what she had done.

"Seja.n.u.s," Rohan said, conversationally, "might I suggest a dressing gown? There is a lady present."

The archduke gave an odd laugh. She thought she recognized that laugh, one at the absurdity of social conventions measured against matters of magic, life, and death. One of Mycene's followers brought the archduke a dressing gown and he wrapped it around himself, whipping the cord into a knot in a few brisk moves. He brushed Vladimer's forehead lightly with the back of his hand, then straightened. "Claudius," he said, "would you be so good as to stay here by Dimi while I sort this out?" He spoke with resonant authority and his actor's confidence, betraying no doubt that he could.

He swung back around the end of the bed. Old Duke Imbre struggled stiff-jointed out of his chair and caught him in a hard hug that abandoned all pretensions of dignity. "It's a miracle," the old man said, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Both less and more than that, I fear," murmured the archduke, and more quietly, "If that is dying, Imbre, once is enough for me." He clapped the old man lightly on the back with a carelessness that his words belied, and steadied Imbre's arm as he sat. He directed the footmen-who were hovering with less than their usual un.o.btrusiveness-to bring chairs for himself and the dukes, and firmly dismissed the dozen or so men who had come with Kalamay. He would have dismissed Phineas Broome, with them, but Mycene said, "He is working for me. He is needed for your safety, Your Grace."

A brief, recollecting pause. "Strange service, for a republican."

Broome was disconcerted; Mycene, familiar with the archduke's ability to retain the details of men and events, was less so. "He did us all the great service of warning me that Vladimer was harboring a dangerous sorceress."

The archduke's expression became remarkably unrevealing. "You gentlemen have the advantage of me. How long was I-indisposed? Is that the sunrise bell I hear?"

"It's been about eight hours," Rohan said. His face and shoulders sagged briefly with the intensity of those hours. "And no, it's the warning bell, though sunrise itself is very close. About three hours ago, Lord Mycene's men launched an artillery barrage against the Mages' Tower, from emplacements on Kalamay's land on the other bank. The tower has been, at the very least, breached, if not toppled outright."

That, if nothing else, shook the archduke's composure. "The Mages' Tower? The Temple itself? Sweet Lady Imogene, Mycene, were you mad?"

Mycene's falcon's head jerked slightly and his nostrils flared in offense. Kalamay said, "Only if it is madness to seek to please the Sole G.o.d."

The archduke ran a hand down his face, the gesture reminiscent of Ishmael. "And have we heard from the Lightborn since?" he said, in a strained voice. "Do we know how many of them were killed?"

"Not a word," said Rohan.